Chris Hargreaves · HARGS Solutions Ltd. / University of Oxford

We are pleased to launch the SOLVE-IT website, providing a central hub for the digital forensics community to access, explore, and contribute to the SOLVE-IT knowledge base.

What this website offers

This website brings together the different ways to interact with SOLVE-IT:

  • Explore the knowledge base – access the interactive HTML explorer, download Excel workbooks, or browse the raw JSON data and ontology representations.
  • Applications – learn how SOLVE-IT can be used during investigations, in developing procedures, and for investigation review.
  • Identify knowledge gaps – discover techniques that lack mitigations or objectives where new techniques could be developed, helping to direct future research.
  • Contribute – submit new techniques, weaknesses, and mitigations through structured forms on GitHub, where contributions are reviewed by SOLVE-IT technical reviewers.

Built around the community

The website is structured around three key user groups:

  • Researchers – explore the knowledge base, identify gaps in current coverage, and contribute new techniques, weaknesses, and mitigations based on your work.
  • Examiners – use SOLVE-IT to support casework, discover relevant techniques, understand potential weaknesses, and find mitigations to strengthen your investigations.
  • Educators – draw on the knowledge base as a teaching resource, helping students understand the landscape of digital forensic techniques and the importance of recognising limitations.

A community project

SOLVE-IT is intended to be built from the collective knowledge of the digital forensics community. Whether you are a practitioner who has encountered a weakness with a particular technique, a researcher developing new forensic methods, or an educator looking to incorporate structured forensic knowledge into teaching, there is a way to get involved.

All contributions go through the GitHub issue tracker, ensuring an open and auditable review process. See the contribute page for details on how to submit new content or update existing entries.

Get started

The best place to start is the SOLVE-IT Explorer, which provides an interactive view of the full knowledge base. From there you can browse objectives, techniques, weaknesses, and mitigations, and identify areas where you might be able to contribute.

We look forward to growing this resource together with the community.

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